This is just one facet of the shrinking of all public services. It’s not happening by accident. It has been a plan for a long time. The resources devoted to education are on the decline. Somebody is going to have to do with less. Much of the burden has already been passed onto the students [...]

The present furor is about people with individual insurance having their policies cancelled and being faced with significantly higher premiums for ACA compliant coverage. The people so affected are about 5% of the public. The largest group of people with health insurance are covered by plans sponsored by their employer, about 50% of the public. [...]

I have read the book and found it to be an excellent mind expanding experience. One of several important messages that I took away from it was that the games that go on between the two parts of the political duopoly are very consciously designed to maintain the status quo. The present regime has been in power for over 40 years and it will take far more than the recent crash to dislodge it.

The religious right/social conservatives would have us believe that their true abiding concerns are the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of traditional marriage. Even though they are rooted in communities that historically supported racial segregation and opposed the civil rights movement, they would have us believe that those may have been the views [...]

In 2008 the California Supreme Court ruled that gays and lesbians were entitled to full marriage under the state constitution. In November the infamous proposition 8 appeared on the general election ballot to amend the state constitution so as to void the effect of the court ruling. When the proposition passed it not only struck [...]

The voices of the progressive black pastors are the ones that need to be heard urgently. What we need to find are ways for their voices to appear in the MSM channels that take such delight in featuring the anti-gay black preachers. Issuing supportive press releases is a good first step, but that doesn’t guarantee that they will be widely noticed.

We have just seen to documented confirmation that NOM has a formal strategy of attempting to drive a wedge between the black community and white gays. One thing that makes such a strategy possible is that the public face of gay rights is almost exclusively white, middle class and mostly male. The take home message from this is that we need to move strongly toward creating much more visible diversity in out movement. It is not just a matter of doing the right thing, but of doing the politically necessary thing.

On the Huffington Post’s Gay Voices blog, Scottie Thomaston, a self-described “queer and criminal justice rights and disability rights activist and writer,” attacked the bill and the Tennessee General Assembly.
He accused state lawmakers of “proposing and passing some of the most homophobic and transphobic bills in the country — it is, after all, the state that passed HB600 stripping local jurisdictions of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] antidiscrimination provisions.”

He also cited two other pending bills, one that exempts schools from an antibullying law when students’ criticism is based on their religious beliefs. Critics call it the “license to bully” bill.

On the Huffington Post’s Gay Voices blog, Scottie Thomaston, a self-described “queer and criminal justice rights and disability rights activist and writer,” attacked the bill and the Tennessee General Assembly.
He accused state lawmakers of “proposing and passing some of the most homophobic and transphobic bills in the country — it is, after all, the state that passed HB600 stripping local jurisdictions of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] antidiscrimination provisions.”

He also cited two other pending bills, one that exempts schools from an antibullying law when students’ criticism is based on their religious beliefs. Critics call it the “license to bully” bill.

I most strongly concur with your thoughts. While I’m not really a Marxist, I’ve always found his use of Hegelian dialectics a catchy way to view history. I am presently looking at neoliberalism waiting for its antithesis to come along.

There is no real coherent push back from the left in either the US or Europe. The threat of communism used to force concessions to the working class in the form of social democracy. That is no longer present. Unions for a variety of reasons have become mostly ineffectual. The whole thing is severely tilted [...]

I’ve been kicking this topic around with a good friend and we were entertaining the notion that the next revolution might be fought on the internet rather than in the streets. This “discussion” would seem to support the possibility.

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